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Amal Saad

@amalsaad_lb

Apr 11

Thread on the Salam government's attempts to obstruct Iran's cease-fire talks and prolong the war:
The “Salam government” will soon become a term that not only designates this current illegitimate administration in Lebanon, but acquires the force of political condemnation and disgrace, emerging as a new descriptor for forms of political treason that exceed the historical analogies typically invoked. Comparisons to Vichy or to the government of Mahmoud Abbas are analytically inadequate, since both were the product of occupation and, in the case of the former, defeat. What makes the Salam government historically unique, and necessitates a new conception of collaboration, is how it is actively defying military victory and the liberation of its territory while also relentlessly obstructing a ceasefire that Iran was on the brink of securing for Lebanon, pursuing instead a prolongation of the war, further occupation, and potentially annexation of that territory. 1/7

The Salam government’s decision to enter into talks with Israel immediately following a massacre that killed over 350 civilians and injured more than 2,000 was coordinated with Israel, with the sole purpose of obstructing the consolidation of a ceasefire that Iran was close to finalising for Lebanon. While it may appear that the government is attempting to pre-empt Iran and claim credit by declaring a ceasefire on Tuesday, it has in fact acquiesced to the continuation of hostilities, as the Israeli ambassador to the US made clear that Israel agreed only to a follow-up meeting to advance a “peace agreement” with Lebanon while explicitly refusing to discuss any ceasefire. 2/7

The Salam government is reportedly proposing a return to the November 2024 agreement, advancing a framework in which Israeli strikes would be confined to so-called "imminent threats from Hizbullah," in other words, Shia areas and Shia civilians, while neutralizing the rest of Lebanon. This decoupling of negotiation from the cessation of violence, and the re-legitimation of a ceasefire-warfare model, restores a status quo ante in which Israel retains the latitude to strike across Lebanon, expand its occupation of Lebanese territory, and prevent the return of displaced populations , effectively reproducing the very conditions that compelled Hizbullah to strike Israel on March 1. In other words, what the Salam government is offering is normalization with Israel without a cease-fire whereby Lebanon normalizes Israel’s war on itself. 3/7

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Amal Saad

@amalsaad_lb

Apr 9

Thread on the upcoming Lebanon–Israel talks:
The so-called negotiations set to take place between Israel and the Lebanese government are little more than a thinly veiled weapon of war aimed at delinking Lebanon from the Iran cease-fire and enabling Netanyahu to prolong the war across both Iran and Lebanon. 1/6

Israel knows the Lebanese authorities can't deliver at the negotiating table any of the objectives they failed to achieve on the battlefield, whether the occupation of even a single village or town, let alone the far more ambitious objectives of a 3-4 km wide buffer zone or Hizbullah’s disarmament. But what Israel hopes to achieve with these talks, beyond prolonging the war on both fronts, is to push Lebanon toward civil strife, in ways that would weaken Hizbullah and further immiserate its Shia constituency. 2/6

And conversely, the Lebanese authorities, despite their evident willingness to surrender South Lebanon to Israel and expose the Shia community to displacement and violence (in short, their intent to rid themselves of what they see as the burden of this territory and its people), are equally aware that Israel cannot secure these outcomes on their behalf either, given that the IDF command has signalled it is nearing “collapse” and cannot be expected to disarm Hizbullah. Yet they continue to wager that prolonging the war on their own people and territory will significantly weaken Hizbullah and erode any political capital it might otherwise have gained in the post-war period. 3/6

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Amal Saad

@amalsaad_lb

Mar 31

Thread on how the government is turning South Lebanon into "nobody's land":
Terra nullius or “nobody's land” was the legal doctrine through which European colonial powers declared inhabited territories available for appropriation, and which Israel used to justify its colonisation of Palestine. The land was declared nobody's not because nobody lived there but because the people living there were deemed not to count and otherwise invisible. This is precisely what Israel is attempting today in South Lebanon and the Lebanese government is not merely failing to prevent this process, but is actively co-producing the conditions that make it possible. 1/5

This morning the Lebanese army withdrew pre-emptively from the frontline Christian villages of Rmeish, Debl and Ain Ebil under orders not to defend itself, despite protests from local residents, in order to avoid being encircled by advancing Israeli troops. At the same time, the state has recently issued a directive to evacuate thirteen displacement centres in the Sour governorate in compliance with Israeli military demands, denying shelter to tens of thousands of its inhabitants, as Israel moves to ethnically cleanse the South. In a parallel development that exposes the absurdity of this compliance, Israel declared today its intent to demolish Lebanese villages along the Rafah model, entrench a permanent occupation line at the Litani within a wider “security zone” extending some 40 km north of the border to Zahrani, and bar the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced southerners. 2/5

By arrogating to itself the institutions of the state while systematically refusing to exercise them in the state's defence, the Lebanese government is not failing to be a state , but preventing the state from being one. Through each of these acts, it’s reducing South Lebanon to terra nullius and, hence, de-sovereigntizing the Lebanese state from within. It’s important to emphasise here that an occupying power moving into territory which a state has voluntarily evacuated has a fundamentally different legal and political position than one advancing against active resistance because the withdrawal does not merely fail to confront occupation, but risks legitimizing it by conceding the ground without contest. 3/5

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Amal Saad

@amalsaad_lb

Mar 30

Thread: There is an increasingly irrational and unhinged quality to both Trump's and Israel's narrative of their war on Iran and Lebanon. The strategic rationality of both Iran's legitimate self-defense against a war of aggression and Hizbullah's resistance to the annexation of southern Lebanon, which the counter-sovereign Lebanese government has been almost desperately trying to hand over to Israel on a silver platter, has become impossible to deny and it explains more about what we are witnessing than any theory about Trump's madness or crude propaganda. 1/5

Trump repeatedly declaring that Iran "has been defeated", while his White House spokesperson insists that "any violence beyond this point will be because Iran refused to understand that they have already been defeated," is too irrational an argument to be taken seriously by anyone of sound mind, given the objective reality of Iran's resounding military successes, and the fact that if Iran was indeed defeated this would obviate the need for the war to continue. 2/5

Neither can anyone take seriously Israel's farcical claim that Ali Choueib — a veteran TV journalist whose face was known across the Arab world for three decades — belonged to Hizbullah's clandestine elite Radwan force. Nor does anyone (including Hizbullah's own domestic rivals) seriously entertain Israel's allegation that Hizbullah uses ambulances to smuggle weapons in order to justify killing scores of paramedics--an allegation all the more stomach-churning given that the Lebanese army confirmed earlier this month that it was Israeli troops who disguised themselves as first responders in their raid on the Bekaa town of Nabi Chit. 3/5

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Amal Saad

@amalsaad_lb

Jun 18, 2025

THREAD: What would happen if Iran collapses as a state?
Unlike previous regime change wars that targeted individual states, what's happening now aims to eliminate the ideological and material infrastructure of resistance across the entire region. As a project rooted in a longstanding cause or idea, it can't be fully crushed; the underlying political and social forces will likely persist. As such, in the event of the Islamic Republic’s collapse, resistance wouldn't end but would transform, from a state-led alliance into a looser, post-axis formation. 1/

The project would be driven underground, shifting to asymmetric tactics and clandestine operations and would no longer be centralized or state-led, yet still coherent and strategically disruptive, operating through more fragmented methods. This wouldn't be the usual blowback that accompanies imperial misadvertures, but a transnational reconfiguration of power and warfare, with diffuse networks capable of targetting US and Israeli interests across multiple theatres over an extended period. It will be take the form of a hybrid war of attrition with no state accountability and no prospect of dialogue 2/

The inevitability of this scenario lies in Iran's foundational logic of resistance and non-sumbission. What is at stake is not just sovereignty, but the ideological core of a decades-long project. As Khamenei declared today, “We will never surrender in response to the attacks of anyone. This is the logic of the Iranian nation.” That logic, drawn from a Shi'a tradition that holds it is better to die resisting than live in humiliation, makes submission not just unlikely but existentially self-defeating. 3/

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Amal Saad

@amalsaad_lb

Jun 16, 2025

THREAD: The death of Khamenei, by itself, is not enough to bring down the Iranian state. Netanyahu has claimed it would end the war, a view echoed by some who fear that his death would trigger the unraveling of the system. But this is based on a false frame of reference that equates Iran with Iraq, Syria or Libya, systems so thoroughly built around a single figure that their destruction unraveled the state itself. 1/

But Iran’s continuity as a state hinges not on the survival of any one individual, but on military and security dynamics—specifically, how it conducts itself in the current war, its ability to absorb repeated shocks and maintain continuity through escalating conflict which could potentially expand into direct confrontation with the US. 2/

While it does concentrate significant power in the office of the Supreme Leader, it also embeds authority across a complex web of institutions and has a thriving civil society. The Islamic Republic is authoritarian, but its representative institutions are real and often fiercely contested; they are not decorative. 3/

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